Columbus budget allows for too few police, fire recruits to replace those retiring

Sunday

Jan 31, 2010 at 12:01 AMJan 31, 2010 at 3:12 AM

Columbus leaders promised last summer that, if voters approved a city income-tax increase, they'd make maintaining the city's safety forces their top priority.

Although the tax passed and the 2010 budget the City Council will take up Monday allocates more than 70 percent of the city's operating money to the police and fire divisions, both forces could shrink.

Why? The number of new recruits to be trained won't offset those on the forces who are expected to retire.

Until last week, when council members amended Mayor Michael B. Coleman's $655 million budget proposal to add $2.2 million for a recruit class of 50 firefighters, the city had no plan to train firefighters in 2010.

Without an additional two classes by the end of 2011, Battalion Chief David Whiting said, the Fire Division will begin to lose personnel through mandatory retirements.

But that also won't be enough to make up for retirements in the Police Division, said Jim Gilbert, president of Fraternal Order of Police Capital City Lodge No. 9.

Raising the city income tax from 2 percent to 2.5 percent is expected to add $84.5 million to the city's budget this year. Without it, said Paul Rakosky, Coleman's finance director, no one would have worried about attrition through retirements because the city would have faced hundreds of police and firefighter layoffs.

"We were talking over 500 layoffs in police and fire," Rakosky said. Given a moment, he dug up the exact figures: 297 police officers and 238 firefighters.

Opponents of the tax were skeptical of those numbers last summer, and they remain so.

Matt Ferris, who ran for the council last year on an anti-tax platform, had proposed $40 million in cuts and said the city could forgo an additional $68million in budget growth to get by without raising taxes or cutting police officers and firefighters.

Ferris said he's glad to see that the council has added a fire class, but he thinks the city should forgo giving raises for safety forces and focus on adding recruits.

"Safety is not measured by how big of a pay increase police and firefighters get," he said. "Safety should be measured by how many police and firefighters we have on the streets to serve the community."

New union agreements with firefighters and police officers will cost the city an additional $7.8 million this year, Rakosky said. That includes $2.3 million for firefighters, who will receive the 4 percent raises they gave up in 2009 when the city budget was struggling, and 2.5percent raises starting in June.

The additional cost for a new police contract in 2010 is $5.5 million. Officers gave up a pension pickup equal to 1 percent of their pay this year, but they received a retroactive raise of 1 percent for 2009, plus 3 percent for this year.

Gilbert, the police-union president, said he fears that the Coleman administration is preparing for attrition in the police ranks with a plan to reconfigure police patrol districts.

He and other officers backed the tax increase, he said, and now the city needs to keep its promise to maintain safety services.

"What they're preparing for is the downsizing of current police services," Gilbert said. "We assured our citizens that we would hold our city leaders accountable."

Antone White, a public-safety spokesman, said dealing with the retirements is a priority for the city.

"If we were to look toward the future, we need more money for additional police classes," he said. "The goal would be to at least maintain where we're at now."